Or you could do it with a CSS table which can free flow to fit the space and have sections that are fixed.

Alya

Summer
Marston

Just tried it - doesn't seem to work.
The template is at http://www.best-software.frih.net/
In the second table:
When I set 3d cell to fixed width like 50px (instead of 5%) and last cell to *% (instead of 5%), the forth cell just gets stretched all the way to right edge of screen

Just tried it - doesn't seem to work.
The template is at http://www.best-software.frih.net/
In the second table:
When I set 3d cell to fixed width like 50px (instead of 5%) and last cell to *% (instead of 5%), the forth cell just gets stretched all the way to right edge of screen

GB
thanks, it's good to know there is another solution

You only asked for a table with three cells...

Alya

LukeakaDanish

Good point! I made the changes.
but it didn't help with cell width issue

Marston
I tried to simplify the question using a more understandable example.

Is there any reason it would not work with 5 cells, but work with three?

Marston

Yes, there is. When you use the "*%" width attribute, that tells the browser to make that cell span the remaining width of the screen...

Summer

lol , if u set the 3rd cell to 50px and u want it to stay at its width , just add a 4th cell with *% .

Alya

Marston
yes, that's what I'd like to do!
I'd like the fifth cell to span the remaining width of the screen

Summer
the forth cell needs to be a percentage of the screen
I'd like the fifth cell to span the remaining width of the screen

foumpie

Alya wrote:

Marston
yes, that's what I'd like to do!
I'd like the fifth cell to span the remaining width of the screen

Summer
the forth cell needs to be a percentage of the screen
I'd like the fifth cell to span the remaining width of the screen

It does NOT work! The third cell (which is supposed to be a fixed length of 50 pixels) gets stretched to occupy the rest of the screen. The fifth cell (instead of occupying rest of the screen) gets totally collapsed to zero.

GB

I tried CSS. When I use absolute positioning with CSS, the design doesn't look good at higher screen resolutions. Everything becomes too close to upper left corner and the rest of screen looks empty.

What I like about setting table-cells as a percentage of screen width is that at higher resolutions things get re-positioned more evenly on the screen.

strfry

This worked absolutely fine for me (copied and pasted your exact code in a file, put <html> and <body> tags around it, and loaded it up). Maybe your browser is broken? What browser type and version are you using?